On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Noufal Ibrahim<noufal at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> I hope this mail finds you all in good health and spirits.
>> I haven't sent any mails to this list before so I'll start by
> saying that my name is Noufal Ibrahim and I'm heading the organisation
> of the first Indian Pycon scheduled to take place at the end of
> September 2009.
>> We're looking for corporate sponsors ie. companies in the country
> that are into Python and who we can make part of the local Python
> community. We have a couple of people who are interested and we're
> following up.
>> One of the things that a potential sponsor asked for is the list of
> delegates along with their contact information (email addresses). We
> never anticipated this and didn't put up a privacy policy on our site
> when we first launched. The support of this sponsor would go a long
> way in covering our costs and actually making the conference a
> success. They promise that they won't spam people. I presume that
> they're going to use it for their recruiting. I'm in a bit of
> dilemma whether to accept or not.
We have often gotten this request from corporate sponsors and even some people who claimed to be a sponsor but were not. We have never given out this information to sponsors. We do have on our registration form an opt-in for receiving e-mails from the PSF/Organizers, but this does not include sponsors.
Instead we created a linked-in non-profit Conference group account and whitelisted all registrants who checked off they were willing to receive e-mails from us. This whitelist is not used by linked-in, nor is a request sent unless you specifically ask for this. Those people whom already have an account on linked in will notice that they can join the group by clicking a button when they log in (or they can dismiss it). We also allowed the sponsors to join the linked in group.
this provides a direct targeted group for the sponsors. These are only people interested in actually hearing from sponsors, and provides a single group e-mail address for them to contact attendees, and provides them with much greater demographic information via public profiles. This is a win-win for both attendees and sponsors.
If a anyone abuses the group (sponsor or attendee), as the maintainer of the group you can remove them and block them.
I have only heard of one person not being satisfied by this option. They had spammed the pycon-reg mailing list trying to get the information and would never say exactly which sponsor they represented (the e-mail was from a hotmail address.)
The create group page is here:
http://www.linkedin.com/createGroup?displayCreate=
and lists the control options.
You can upload a simple CSV file for a whitelist.
I require non-whitelisted accounts to be approved by the admins as we get a bunch of marketing firms and sales people trying to join to harvest information otherwise. I always check the requests against the attendee list and request information from people whom do not match. Most I never hear back from, the rest are up front about what they are after.
Hope this helps.
-Doug
> A couple of the more experienced people tell me that this is a
> standard practice during most corporate conferences. I wanted to know
> if any of the other PyCon organisers faced such a situation and if
> they did, what was their course of action.
>> Thanks.
>> --
> ~noufal
>http://nibrahim.net.in> _______________________________________________
> Conferences mailing list: Conferences at python.org>http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/conferences>> This is an open list with open archives; sensitive or confidential information should not be discussed here.
>
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